Eighteen Who Saw Death One with a Friend
by brainchild
Summary: Death comes to everyone, silent and persistent. It's the extraordinary people, who greet Him without fear.


Author's Note: It only recently came to my attention that this story previously did not have an dividers! A very sad way to write a series of vignettes. So now I hope this clears everything up quite well. Thanks forever for the feedback!

* * *

**Eighteen Who Saw Death (One With a Friend)**

Almost despite herself, Tonks _loved_ Fleur Delacour. At first it was just amusement at how much of a ruckus the other woman could cause the entire Weasley clan without even trying, but then Tonks made a joke about being married to a werewolf and Fleur laughed, saying something about Bill's eating habits at the full moon. They became fast friends, an abnormality in Fleur's experience.

"Most women are jelees of me," Fleur explained in her lilting French accent, shrugging one shoulder with innocent grace.

"Most women can't make themselves look like you," Tonks said, replicating the other woman's features down to her perfect skin even as she accidentally knocked a fork off the table.

Fleur laughed with delight. "That ees wonderful."

"I don't know about 'wonderful,'" Tonks said, shifting her features back to normal as she picked up the misplaced utensil. "I prefer pink hair to blonde."

The smile on Fleur's face would have bowled a man over. "Pink suits you."

So knowing her as well as she did, Tonks wasn't surprised to see Fleur there when people tumbled out of the fireplace at Hogwarts to join the fight. She had, after all, been one of only five women in history to compete in the Triwizard tournament. But Fleur's reaction to Tonks _was_ a surprise.

"What are you doing 'ere?" Fleur asked, pushing past the people between them.

Tonks held her wand tight. "I'm an Auror."

"You hav' a bébé," Fleur said, glaring as the mass of people slipped around them. "Go 'ome."

How dare she? "I won't."

"You are selfeesh."

A brief flash of Teddy's face, his little hands all curled up in a fist. "I'm doing this for Teddy."

"Your son needs a muzzer more than an 'ero," Fleur said, shaking her long blonde hair. And maybe she was right, but Tonks had never walked—or even stumbled—away from a fight before. Never left a man behind, and she wasn't about to start with her husband.

"Remus is here," Tonks said.

The look that crossed Fleur's face was a mix between exasperation and incredulity, much like the one Tonks's mother had sported when her only daughter announced without preamble that she was in love with a werewolf who was almost fifteen years older than her and planned to make him realize that he was in love with her, too.

"Men are so stupeed," Fleur said, narrowing her pretty eyes. "Do they think we cannot fight ourselves?"

"Well I don't think _they_ can fight alone," Tonks said, pressing through the crowd, Fleur beside her.

"You both should theenk about your son," Fleur said, hand on Tonks's arm as they reached the door.

"I am. I'm doing this to make the world better for him," Tonks said, but they both knew she was lying. She was there for the same reason as Fleur: because they were strong, smart, and could not live the rest of their lives with the guilt of knowing they could have made a difference if they had just fought.

"Make it back to your bébé," Fleur said as they followed the surge out of the room.

"I will," Tonks promised as the first spells shot out.

* * *

He left. He left. He left.

And Merope Gaunt curled up over her protruding belly.

This is death, she thought, clutching at herself. This is death.

* * *

The Forbidden Forest was still dark and brooding, but everything exciting about it had been stripped away in the gloomy new world they lived in, where even the snow on the trees looked dull and lifeless as Ginny and the other detention-bound students stood on the edge.

A girl shuddered and said, "I can't go in there."

"It's no worse than the castle these days," Ginny said, thinking of the awful new staff members who doled out bruises for bad marks, and scars for attitude problems.

"But the Forbidden Forest—" Even Colin, who had distracted Filch and his cat a dozen times with feigned stupidity, looked shaky.

"Look, mates, we'll be fine," Neville said confidently, an entirely different person than he had been the year before. "We stole the sword, didn't we?"

Ginny grinned. Yes, they had. Mostly because of the slew of contraband WWW products her brothers still smuggled her.

"Come on," she said, holding out her wand as she marched down the path between the looming trees, expecting the others to follow. "Let's go find these plants."

"Not as scary now as it was when I was eleven," Neville said, walking beside her into the overhanging trees, glancing up at the bare branches.

"Well, when you were eleven, you hadn't fought Death Eaters and led a student rebellion," Ginny said.

"That's been fun," Neville said with a little grin despite his arm being in a sling and a new scar on the side of his neck.

Ginny shook her head, and the dead leaves under the snow crunched beneath their feet.

"I know it's probably hard for you, being here when Harry's... out there," Neville said quietly, out of earshot of their friends, and a jolt of pain and worry went through Ginny before she quickly pushed it away. "But I'm glad you're here."

"Me, too." This Ginny could focus on. "I'm causing Snape grief."

"And the Carrows. We're driving them mad," Neville said with a wicked grin, pleased to bursting at foiling the Death Eaters' easy takeover of their beloved school. Yes, she thought as she kept walking into the darkness beside her once and current closest mate, I'm doing okay.

* * *

Amelia Bones had fled her grandmother's stuffy house and boring rules the moment she turned seventeen, signing up to be a flier in the Ministry Air Guard that very day. They issued her a broom, and told her to kick off; they were lucky she was born ready to fight the armies of the world.

It was a war she joined—a world war—but she had never felt more free than twisting in the air between those mean little Muggle bullets, shooting Charms and Hexes with equal zeal to wrap around the soldiers feet and drag them back to the trenches.

Born in Poland at the beginning of the century, she was just nineteen years old when she flew over Berlin like a streak of deadly purple light, bending spells around the enemy like a composer with a symphony of poisoned notes.

"Have caution! You're not invisible you know," a wiry, angry soldier yelled to her before a man on the ground shot him off his broom.

"I have you covered," shouted the little, half-boy Flitwick as he zipped around her to take the fallen man's place.

"Then once more into the breach, dear friends!" Amelia commanded, racing into the cloud of spells and dipping her toes in Muggle destruction. She never felt alive except when dancing past the outreached hand of death.

She thought often of those days during Wizengamot discussions, especially the day Harry Potter stood before her nearly a century later-defiant. Strong. Entwined with an edge of danger as only the young and passionate could ever be. As she wished she could be again.

* * *

Rowena only ever saw her out of the corner of her eye, floating into a wall just beyond her sight. Some days she wanted to scream for her, her daughter, ask her to come back. Most days she just wanted to find an escape in death.

"Do not act like a fool," Salazar said as they traversed the corridors of their finely built castle. "She made her choices. Accept them."

Rowena walked stiffly, not daring to turn her head in the vain hope that she might glimpse her daughter's ghost once more. "I cannot forgive myself. She is dead because of me."

"And?" he asked. "We have all watched loved ones die."

Yes, they had.

They had been reckless, powerful children. Prideful, arrogant adults. But now Rowena stood humbled in the castle they had built as a monument to themselves, wishing she could give everything she gained back to have her husband and daughter with her again. The price of empathy and wisdom was too high to bear.

"Perhaps I don't want to survive this latest folly," Ravenclaw told her dear friend, who had held her when she couldn't leave her husband's deathbed.

"You're too strong to give in now," Salazar said dismissively.

But that was the problem. She had been strong enough to survive a hundred more years in her broken, limping life, to teach the students she had been arrogant enough to Sort by qualities no eleven year old should have. Too prideful to let life take its course, she would live as long as Merlin, and make every mistake he did a hundred times as they told the story of the Founding. And how many more would she hurt? How many more ghosts would live just beyond her sight?

* * *

"You don't have to go, you know," Millicent said, twisting her arm around the wood post on the edge of Pansy's bed.

"Are you questioning my loyalty?" the black-haired girl hissed, jerking her head to the side to toss her long bangs out of her eyes.

"No."

Pansy nodded smartly, and the bangs went back to obscuring her dark blue eyes. "It's my cause."

"Really?" It was certainly fed to her from a young age, fed to them all as milk from an ugly, snake-like mother's breast.

"Yes. Why wouldn't I go?" Pansy asked, her hands shaking. She had never been a particularly good Slytherin. If she were, the answer to her question would have been obvious: Don't go because Harry Potter was going to win. Sure, the Dark Lord was scary, but Potter was stubborn and lucky. And stubborn and lucky always beat scary. He'd proved that for the last seven years.

"You could support them... from here," Millicent said, not really knowing how to tell Pansy that her life didn't have to end at seventeen.

Pansy, who had the misfortune of having a mediocre-looking mother with an inferiority complex and a father too caught up in himself to ever express interest in his child except when she was making blazingly awful choices, shook her head.

"If he were hurt... I couldn't stand it." They both knew that Pansy wasn't talking about the Dark Lord or her father. She was talking about a blonde-haired boy who didn't give two shits about her.

"You sound like a Gryffindor," Millicent muttered quietly.

And pretty little Pansy actually laughed, shaking her head in disbelief. "I know!"

"Our parents—" Millicent scrunched up her mouth and eyebrows before haltingly continuing. "We don't...We don't have to fight with them."

"Of course not. I'm going to fight beside them. With honor," Pansy said, a touch uncertainly, always teetering between crazy and stupid. Because there was no honor there, in that battle and the blood of their peers being spilled. There wasn't honor anywhere in the death that stained the castle where they had grown up.

Because really, what had Hermione Granger and Terry Boot ever done to them except act all swotty and smart?

The Inquisitorial Squad had been one thing. But this fight? No. Millicent wanted none of the green light that her parents wielded with glee.

"You could die," Millicent said, forcing the blunt word out.

Pansy shuddered once before resolve poured down her spine like syrup. The short girl straightened her posture in her tailored school robes, wand in hand. "I have to be there."

They cracked apart, and Millicent just watched her friend charge off toward a reckless, no-win fight, wondering why everyone called her the dumb one.

* * *

Mothers are not made for war, Molly Weasley thinks. They feel a single death like a slice across their hearts and eyes, to never see the world the same. Left to remember the hands that fade to nothing on the face of the old, grandfather clock.

But when she sees Bellatrix Lestrange threaten her only daughter, she comes between them as she wishes she could have come between Fred and his death, between Harry and You-Know-Who. Because mothers, it turns out, are built to combat darkness, to stand between their children and war.

* * *

"I can't believe she's dead," Narcissa replied, standing perfectly still with her long, thin hands tucked away in her pockets and clear, blue eyes staring at the newest tombstone in the Rosier Plot. Bellatrix would have rolled her eyes if she hadn't thought that the habit was beneath her.

"Don't be dramatic." As always, it was Andromeda who spoke frankly.

Bellatrix agreed, tugging at her collar with her gloved hands. "We have two other, perfectly functioning grandparents still alive. I don't see why this one should warrant our waiting in the cold."

"It is an archaic tradition," Andromeda agreed, glancing at the little frozen spot of the ground where their libation had been poured. It was absurd to ban Heating Charms at funerals.

"Aunt Walburga liked the service," Narcissa said, her breath visible in the cold air.

"Aunt Wal's a nutcase," Andromeda said, thinking of her two young cousins who had worn their best robes for the occasion and sat as still as any of the adults. Growing up in that house must be awful.

"At least she was here," Bellatrix said, letting bitterness saturate her words. "At least she bothered to notice that the three of us are still alive and home for the holiday, let alone that our grandmother, whom she's not related to, died."

"True," Andromeda agreed, her mitten-covered hands clasped in front of her and the top two buttons of her coat undone, as if arctic weather didn't affect her.

Bellatrix's feelings regarding their parents was hardly novel. Mr. and Mrs. Cygnus Black had started having children when Cygus was twenty-one and his tiny trophy wife just sixteen. Neither knew what to do with the three little girls that failed to carry on the Black name, so they hired the best help in England and spent all their time in exotic elsewheres, leaving their eldest daughter to fill the role as sister, mother, and protector. It had warped Bellatrix badly, most of all when Aunt Walburga dropped by, ever attentive to her sons.

Jealousy was ugly, even on Bellatrix's pretty features.

"Our parents should be here," little Narcissa said, thin and seemingly fragile, looking up at her big sisters to make it right. Andromeda and Bellatrix just shared a world-weary look that only teenagers can truly master. "It's mother's mother who died."

"Yes, it was, and yes they should," Andromeda said, turning to her sister. "But Mother always treated us like dolls and friends. We've gone months without seeing her. This isn't anything new."

"Exactly! They are awful, selfish people," Bellatrix said, turning her eyes to Grand-mère's new tombstone. "They should be more like Grand-mère was."

"Grand-mère? Her three grandchildren are standing over her grave in cold of winter and none of them feel sad. Her daughter couldn't be bothered to return from the house in Italy to attend the funeral, and her son-in-law is somewhere in Portugal," Andromeda said, incredulous. "Do you think that's to be emulated? To so alienate the people in your life that even your own blood won't weep at your passing?"

"You wept for her," Bellatrix said, annoyed that the sister she relied on for straightforward conversation was turning so Socratic.

"I wept for the idea of her," Andromeda said, not yet sixteen and already so polished.

Bellatrix conjured a chair and sank onto it, despite the fact that resting wasn't permitted during the family vigil. She crossed her legs and tried not to show how uncomfortable the seat was. Her youngest sister had always been better at conjuring.

"I won't let this happen to me," Narcissa said, her features hardening, making her look more like a marble sculpture. "When I die, I want it to matter to someone."

"I want it to matter to everyone," Bellatrix said, smirking at the image of the glorious death she would embody. She grinned up at Andromeda with her half-crazed smile that meant she was planning something particularly rebellious, but her steady sister ignored it. "Don't tell me it doesn't intrigue you, to think of ways to shake the world when you die."

"I don't think about death," Andromeda said, resting against the arm of Bella's chair.

Narcissa looped her arm through Andromeda's without looking at her in the dark, cold night. "I'm glad you two are here. I'd weep for you."

"You'll have to, since I'm sure I'll die first," Bellatrix said, laughing. "I'm not the type to live to ripe old age, so I'm counting on you two to do this stupid libation thing when I go, because if we have to suffer through this, you know I'm going to make people do it for me."

"We would do it," Narcissa assured her, nodding solemnly.

"That's what happens when you have parents as lousy as ours," Andromeda said lightly, leaning against Bellatrix's shoulder. "You have extraordinary sisters to make up for it."

* * *

Shaking and terrified, Hermione watched her mother as her memories came back, her eyes growing wide with knowledge and hurt.

"Mum?" Hermione croaked.

"Mum?" the woman repeated, and the word crawled slowly out of her mouth, wrapping Hermione up in its thick oppression as Mrs. Granger stood realizing that the person in front of her was indeed her daughter. Was indeed there.

"I'm sorry it took me so long to come back," Hermione said, her throat tight with controlled emotion, with images of dead friends and scars and the responsibility she bore for so many months in a tiny, heavy purse.

She fought a war, Mrs. Granger—yes, that is your name. She lived in a forest and built a camp with her best friends. Found pieces of an evil man's soul and then found a way to destroy them. She stood over Harry's parents' graves, arm wrapped around his waist. She rode a dragon and traveled to hidden houses on the edge of an ocean. She watched Ron leave and cried when he came back and kissed him, finally, when the last battle began. She was tortured, made to scream, but that pain was nothing next to seeing Harry cradled in Hagrid's arms, dead, or the relief at seeing him rise again. She saw a hundred dead friends. She heard them cry and watched them fall. She watched Harry win at last.

They're calling her a hero. They're giving her awards.

But she never forgave herself for making you forget when you begged her not to, when your husband held you tightly in his arms as you pleaded that mothers should never forget their children; you said it would break you, forgetting her, but he nodded for her to do it. She never forgave herself for making your eyes go fuzzy and telling you that you had no daughter.

So she waited in the doorway of the house where she had kept you safe, a hero and a genius, hoping you could grant forgiveness in the aftermath of war.

"You're safe." Her mother's voice broke over the last word, and she was crying, holding Hermione tight in her warm, soft arms. "My daughter. My Hermione. You're safe."

Tears wrenched through Hermione's body as she clung to her mother and let her burden fade.

* * *

Minerva McGonagall would never admit it today, but she had huffed irritably when she discovered that her animagus form was a cat. A tabby cat, of all things.

Minerva McGonagall, you see, had wanted to be bird. Specifically, a Marquesan Monarch found only in the high mountains of New Zealand. The exact opposite of a house cat that could be named Mrs. Tibbles and found in the home at the end of the block, where a strange-smelling woman kept a dozen other cats just like it.

She had wanted to fly.

"What's so great about flying?" Aurora Sinistra asked, wiping sweat from her brow as she finished setting up the third-to-last Christmas tree in the Great Hall with Charity Burbage, who, as Muggle Studies professor, had insisted that it be done like a Muggle one. "Seems to me, if you wanted to fly, you just grab a broom."

"That's not the point," Charity said, tossing tinsel at the other professor. "Minerva wanted to be a bird."

"A Marquesan Monarch," Minerva corrected curtly, unwilling to suggest that she would have been satisfied with a pigeon.

"A bird," Sinistra said, shaking her head.

"But you're a cat," Charity said, wiping her hands on her pants as she smiled at the other woman on their first Christmas together as professors. "Sturdy, clever, grounded. Nothing wrong with that."

It was just common.

"Certainly not a useless bird," Sinistra said. "A fluttering, flying thing that's whipped around by the wind and has to move south all the time. What's so good about a bird?"

Birds, Minerva thinks years later, flew over battles between children and evil. A bird could have pretended the soft, wet bodies under her paws were ants when seen from the sky. A bird wouldn't have to push aside each death from its tiny bird brain to slink into the middle of the fight, where a black-haired boy she taught was fighting a man who had once been the best Transfiguration student in her year, before he decided to fly away into evil. A bird wouldn't have drawn its wand and joined in the common fray.

But then she hat always been a cat, a tiny lion.

* * *

The sheer size of the enemy was overwhelming, and watching them advance on their location was awful, but seeing Voldemort in the back of that group, red eyes narrowed and wand in hand, made the situation seem completely, ridiculously lopsided.

"You think we have a chance?" Lily asked with that dazzling smile that felled better men than he.

"There's always a chance," James said amiably, as if discussing an upcoming Quidditch game even as his bloody fingers curled around his wand, outstretched before them, "but if we don't, we're going to go out spectacularly."

Her laughter echoed through their prison, bouncing toward the Death Eaters who stared at this young couple—just out of school and barely recognizable—like they were the strangest creatures they'd ever seen.

"If that's the case," she said, shaking her matted, dirty hair out, "I'll take the twenty on the left."

"Then I'll take the right."

Clasping his hand in hers, she nodded. "Try to keep up."

"As if you could stop me," he said, eyes still locked on the arrogant enemy.

"I love you, James," she said suddenly, fiercely, so he let his eyes drift to her quickly.

"I never doubted it."

* * *

Oh, she missed them. Missed them with a pain that could not be eased. Could not be described.

The arrogant youth she had once been had hardened and cracked and fled in the face of the sorrow that burrowed in her heart and lodged in her throat.

A husband, sister, and daughter buried together. A son-in-law, too. A family that left her standing on the edge of the columbarium with a blue-haired baby that cried in her arms because she had no comfort to spare. Nothing to give except empty tears for the people whom war had killed. Who were gone and shouldn't be because they were too young. Because they were her life, that husband of thirty years and daughter of twenty-five. Because that sister had been family. Because surely, she couldn't be alone. Because why in the world would someone have so much grief expanding in their chest? How could she be expected to survive this? Who would want to?

Who could breathe under the pressure of this pain?

"Andromeda." A hand curled over her shoulder, and there was her other sister, her pretty sister whom she hadn't seen in years. And that was all it took for her last bit of false strength to shatter.

"Narcissa," she croaked, her face crumbling, her legs failing as she sagged against her tall thin sister and sobbed between gasps of air, Teddy squished between them.

Her sister cried too, holding her shaking in her arms in the aftermath of war. And Andromeda Tonks dug her long fingers into her sister's back and the grief poured out between them in painful bursts that felt like they would never end. _Oh, Merlin. Oh, God. Please, let this anguish lessen. Let this grief dilute. Let me please stop hurting. Let this not be real. Let these bodies not be my family. My dear ones. My loves in the ground. Cold and broken and impossibly far. Please let me wake. Please let this grief not be mine. _

_Please. _

_Please. _

_Please._

* * *

Luna's mum always said that someday everyone would have to explain what they did with their lives—the most important thing. She never told Luna who they would have to explain to or why they would care, but Mrs. Lovegood was right about most things, and Luna trusted her. So when she told her it was important to know the answer—the real answer—Luna listened.

That meant that for some people, like Professor Dumbledore, even though they had spent a hundred years teaching students and helping people join secret clubs and scaring Dark Lords, they would have to talk about the death of their sister and how they were such an arrogant teenager.

That seemed odd, which Luna pointed out to her mum, who gave her that look mums give kids who have just caught sight of a large, deep mud puddle in the middle of the road and are clearly going to go play in it in their nicest clothes despite anything a mum might say.

"Then you must live," she said in her soft, patient voice, "as if you might always be doing the most important thing you ever will, and behave so that you will never be ashamed to tell other people what you are doing. Because death, Luna, comes to everyone. It's how you welcome it that makes the difference."

So Luna went through life knowing a truth that no one else seemed to understand, especially in the dungeon where the Death Eaters kept her locked up.

"I broke my hands to keep from making their wands," the man—her fellow prisoner—whispered to her at the end of her second week in the dripping dungeon.

"That was brave," Luna said, sitting beside him and wanting very much to give him an apple.

"Foolish," he whispered, shaking his head and looking down at his perfectly healthy hands—the only part of him without a scratch, bruise, or splat of blood. "There's no point resisting."

"There's always a point to resisting," Luna said, surprised that such an old person wouldn't know that. "Otherwise the Loch Ness Monster wouldn't be so famous, would he?"

He turned his large eyes on her. She found the silver comforting. "How can you see hope in this bleak dungeon?"

"I have good eyes. It's over in the corner now, I think. In the shadows," she said, knowing it took a special sort of person to show it to others, a person more like Harry than her, but she would try her best.

"I am too afraid and hurt to see it," he said, not even trying.

"Afraid?" Luna smiled even though it hurt the bruises on her cheeks from when that Death Eater had punched her for not understanding his question about the things little girls should do in dungeons. "Don't you have a story to tell?"

He shook his head, but said, "I have a hundred stories to tell."

"Then you shouldn't be afraid." Luna's confidence was staggering. "Death will listen. At least, that's who I think listens."

"I don't want to die," he whispered, which struck her.

"I suppose I don't either." Honesty was always best when talking about Death. "Because I only just made friends, and I think I could find a Blibbering Humdinger with enough time, but my mum died six years ago, and I would so like to see her again." Ollivander's large eyes watched her sadly. "My dad probably wants to see me, too, and he's alive. So I will have to disappoint one of them, but then I'll just wait for the other like we promised."

The dripping water kept dripping, and footsteps echoed in time to a tune she used to sing as a child.

"I don't know how long I can keep waiting," he admitted quietly.

Luna took his clean, perfect hands in her dirty, bruised ones. "It's easier to wait together. You'll see."

He breathed in a few times.

"You have loved people, too," she said. "You told me about them."

He nodded. "My son. My wife."

"Tell me about them again, so I will recognize them when I meet them."

So he did, and Death waited—amiable, patient Death, who sweeps through us all. He waited in the corner beside Hope. They always came together, though one sometimes shone brighter.


End file.
